Various techniques and products exist for verifying, qualifying and/or quantifying the performance of networking devices and infrastructure. One existing technique is to generate traffic destined for a device under test (DUT) at the full bandwidth and maximum connection rates of the device. This stresses networking equipment by causing constant setup/teardown of stateful (e.g. TCP) connections and exposing weakness in processing, memory access, and other areas. The true performance of the equipment can then be determined with capability of the DUT to keep up with connection rate, Goodput (i.e. the amount of throughput that is the actual bits/s of data to be transferred without any overhead) measurements through the DUT, and the number of concurrent connections that are opened at any given time.
However, these and other existing techniques have many shortcomings. Many of them use off-the-shelf TCP stacks (e.g. Linux) with some modifications. In such cases sending a packet incurs a large amount of system overhead, making the equipment complex and expensive to generate high traffic rates. That, combined with complexity of configuring the existing equipment, requires extensive investment in both capital expenditures and operating expenditures on the user side. To get around the complexity and performance bottlenecks, some techniques use custom test patterns, which may not reflect actual real-world network traffic. A need remains, therefore, for test equipment that can be easily used by development professionals, sales professionals, and network infrastructure professionals and can reliably provide consistent results across the board.